A large new talent that can go anywhere it wants.
Eleven stories demonstrating a broad imagination and a chameleon’s ability to leap seamlessly from culture to culture, subject to subject.
In the title piece, a Cuban high-school student invents a boyfriend to keep pace with her girlfriend, only to have the friend’s romance emulate the dramas of the imagined one. “La Perche” portrays a restaurant, born of the inspiration of a fat man and a bulimic woman, thriving on the themes of tragedy and eating disorders. In “The Details of Women,” a man is shocked when a girlfriend from wilder days in Paris intrudes on his suburban middle years, but this traumatic nostalgia might very well turn into redemption. The protagonist of “Make it Good” decides that the only way to finally lasso her reluctant-to-commit beau is to apply the techniques of the public relations firm for which they both work. A group of Gen-Xers who pride themselves on a “movement of no movement” threatens to unravel when one of its members begins to excel at their favorite pastime (“Take the Slackers Bowling”). In “The Bruise on Jupiter,” a Jewish woman struggles with her identity and her conscience as the punishment for having injured her own children fails to quell her desire to bear more. Newcomer Bannan consistently displays a rare literary fearlessness in the subject matter she tackles, stepping far outside the boundaries of personal experience and refusing to be pigeonholed in either content or style. The result is a vast portrait of a truly diverse America that is absurd, ridiculous, human, and spreading (in “Comfort Isn’t Everything”) to a Russia where you can sail past coffeebars with “all the ingredients in stock, past outlet malls where the air conditioning was just right. Cineplexes with 20 screens showing all the latest releases.”
A large new talent that can go anywhere it wants.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-88748-397-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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